Two important innovations in TerraME are its use of anisotropic spaces and of hybrid automata models. Anisotropic spaces arise when modeling natural and human-related phenomena. For example, land settlers in a new area do not occupy all places at the same time. They follow roads and rivers, leading to an anisotropic pattern. Anisotropic spaces are implemented in TerraME using Generalized Proximity Matrices (GPM). The GPM is an extension of the usual definition of the spatial relations and include a combination of neighborhood measures in the absolute space and in the relative space.

A hybrid automaton is an abstract model for a system whose behavior has discrete and continuous parts. It extends the idea of finite automata to allow continuous change to take place between transitions. Adopting hybrid automata in spatial dynamical models allows complex models which include critical transitions.

TerraView

TerraView is a GIS application based on TerraLib, a library to handle vector and raster data in several geographical DBMS. TerraME currently works with TerraView 4.2.0. Some useful plugins to work with dynamic models that come within TerraView are:

Fill Cell Plugin: Feeds cellular spaces with attributes based on any geometry, through a large set of operations.

Copytheme2layer: A simple and useful plugin to interchange cellular spaces from different databases.

DBMS

The DataBase Management Systems (DBMS) currently supported by TerraME are:

Microsoft Access: Recommended for small projects. It usually comes installed on Windows.

Statistical analysis

aRT (R-TerraLib API) is an R package that provides the integration between the statistical software R and the GIS library TerraLib. The aim is to have a package for accessing geospatial data to be analysed in R.

Supporting Software

The TerraME modelling language is an extension of the Lua programming language and interfaces to http://www.terralib.org GIS library for archival and retrieval of geospatial data. Many thanks to the Lua and TerraLib teams for providing such good environments to build upon!

About

TerraME has been developed as a joint effort among TerraLab (Laboratory for Modelling and Simulation of Earth Systems), at Federal University of Ouro Preto, with Earth System Science Center (CCST) and Image Processing Division (DPI), at INPE.